She has stunned me.
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| "The quiet midnight warrior, without a sound, brings glory to her King ." | | |
It is rare for one of my paintings to stop me in my tracks and send shivers down my spine. But the more I gazed upon this wee painting, the more in awe I became.
One: it is rare for my paintings to appear looking at the viewer. "Lusinga", "Roseilee", and "Mourning" are the only ones....recently...that look at you. "Lusinga" and "Mourning" are some of my top sellers.
Two: The movement feels like a quiet moment, paused or in slow motion, as she passes by me while I'm on a night walk.
Three: Her wisdom and strength just presses upon my chest and makes me hold my breath....in a good way. The only thing I can compare that to is when I've seen a buck in our front yard during the winter. It's such a serene and heavenly moment that you want to last forever because of the majesty it represents.
Four: I see God in her eyes and in her breath. I'm astounded by that.
And Five: No colored pencil except for the drawing itself under the paint. I'm pretty proud of the richness I was able to create without relying on the colored pencil.
It's hard to believe she's only 4x6 inches, and the piece took me less than 48 hours. This is truly a piece by me from God. And I am in awe of his Majesty.
She is, of course, available on Etsy as a 6.5x10 inch print:
http://www.etsy.com/listing/81823852/print-fairy-in-golden-owl-mask-halloweenv
By Ulinka Rublack
I will never forget the day when a friend’s husband returned home to Paris from one of his business trips. She and I were having coffee in the huge sun-light living-room overlooking the Seine. We heard his key turn the big iron door. Next a pair of beautiful, shiny black shoes flew through the long corridor with its beautiful parquet floor. Finally the man himself appeared. “My feet are killing me!”, he exclaimed with a veritable sense of pain. The shoes were by Gucci.
We might think that these are the modern follies of fashion, which only now beset men as much as women. My friend too valued herself partly in terms of the wardrobe she had assembled and her accessories of bags, sunglasses, stilettos and shoes. She had modest breast implants and a slim, sportive body. They were moving to Dubai. In odd hours when she was not looking after children, going shopping, walking the dog, or jogging, she would write poems and cry.
Yet, surprisingly, neither my friend nor her husband would seem very much out of place at around 1450. Men wore long pointed Gothic shoes then, which hardly look comfortable and made walking down stairs a special skill. In a German village, a wandering preacher once got men to cut off their shoulder-long hair and slashed the tips of the pointed shoes. Men and women aspired to an elongated, delicate and slim silhouette. Very small people seemed deformed and were given the role of grotesque fools. Italians already wrote medical books on cosmetic surgery.
We therefore need to unlock an important historical problem: How and why have looks become more deeply embedded in how people feel about themselves or others? I see the Renaissance as a turning point. Tailoring was transformed by new materials, cutting, and sewing techniques. Clever merchants created wide markets for such new materials, innovations, and chic accessories, such as hats, bags, gloves, or hairpieces, ranging from beards to long braids. At the same time, Renaissance art depicted humans on an unprecedented scale. This means that many more people were involved in the very act of self-imaging. New media – medals, portraits, woodcuts, genre scenes – as well as the diffusion of mirrors enticed more people into trying to imagine what they looked like to others. New consumer and visual worlds conditioned new emotional cultures. A young accountant of a big business firm, called Matthäus Schwarz, for instance, could commission an image of himself as fashionably slim and precisely note his waist measures. Schwarz worried about gaining weight, which to him would be a sign of ageing and diminished attractiveness. While he was engaged in courtship, he wore heart-shaped leather bags as accessory. They were green, the colour of hope. Hence the meaning of dress could already become intensely emotionalized. The material expression of such new emotional worlds – heart-shaped bags for men, artificial braids for women, or red silk stockings for young boys – may strike us as odd. Yet their messages are all familiar still, to do with self-esteem, erotic appeal, or social advancement, as are their effects, which ranged from delight in wonderful crafting to worries that you had not achieved a look, or that someone just deceived you with their look. In these parts of our lives the Renaissance becomes a mirror which leads us back in time to disturb the notion that the world we live in was made in a modern age.
Ever since the Renaissance, we have had to deal with clever marketing as well as the vexing questions of what images want, and what we want from images, as well as whether clothes wear us or we wear them.
Ulinka Rublack is Senior Lecturer in early modern European history at Cambridge University and a Fellow of St John’s College. Her latest
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She is so beautiful, especially the expression on her face.
Stunning indeed. And thank you for professing your faith through your work.
She is truly amazing!!! I think I will need this one. :))